Full Panel
Panelists
Matt Soar, Midi Onodera, Mél Hogan, Florian Thalhofer
Biographies
Matt Soar, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, is codirector, with Professor Monika Kin Gagnon, of the SSHRC- funded Adventures in Research-Creation (ARC) project. Soar is an intermedia artist and graphic designer with graduate degrees in Communication.
Midi Onodera is an award-winning, Toronto-based filmmaker who has been directing, producing and writing films for over twenty years. Onodera’s films have been critically recognized and included in numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally.
Mél Hogan is doing a two-year research fellowship in digital curation in the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Hogan is also the art director of online and p.o.d. journal of arts and politics, nomorepotlucks.org.
Florian Thalhofer is a Berlin-based artist and filmmaker, and the inventor of the Korsakow System.
Abstract
In the last few years we have seen a veritable flood of digital media authoring tools for creators and researchers interested in new forms of storytelling for the web, many of them opensource. One of these tools is the Korsakow System, a software application for creating database-driven narratives. Korsakow emphasizes flexibility and ease of use, and the creation of elegant browser-based films with minimalist interfaces. Korsakow was invented in 2000 by one of the presenters on this panel, Florian Thalhofer, and has been used to create hundreds of films over the last decade. New features in development include mapping/GPS functionality and iPad/HTML5 exporting. Much of the uptake of Korsakow, in terms of production and teaching, has been in the digital humanities. For example, Adrian Miles (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and his students have created literally dozens of films over the past three years, all of them available for viewing online. Soar, Thalhofer and Hogan all incorporate Korsakow into their teaching. Classes and workshops have been held at, for example, York, Concordia, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School (NYU), and at UT Austin Portugal. Films have been produced by students at Concordia, Ryerson, the London College of Communications, and RMIT. Korsakow films, most of them non-fictional, have been made about: US/Canada bordertowns; Canada’s Expo ’67; life on and around the Galata Bridge in Istanbul; the experience of working for Starbucks and Costco; and, the archival traces of an unfinished experimental film (what its maker, Monika Kin Gagnon, refers to as ‘posthumous cinema’).
For this panel, four Korsakow filmmakers will present their reflections on working with the software. Soar will talk about two films: his recently completed ‘database diary‘ Ceci N’est Pas Embres www.embres.ca and an ongoing series of ‘sketch‘ films remediating 35mm movie film leaders www.lostleaders.ca Midi Onodera’s film-in-progress is about her experiences as an embedded artist with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. She writes: “The war in Afghanistan is a subject that Canadian artists have yet to fully explore. Access is restricted and filtered through a heavy veil of censorship. In war there are a number of different narratives complimenting and contrasting the surface, authority and the individual. These narratives are never resolved and become fragments of incomplete stories anchored in the context of conflict. I believe that Korsakow is the perfect format for this exploration of fragmented narrative and by doing the project I hope to cast an alternative perspective on our historical assumptions about war.” Hogan, a postdoc in digital curation at the Brakhage Media Center (University of Colorado – Boulder), will present her findings on the use of Korsakow as a curatorial tool for experimental media collections. Thalhofer will discuss his new project, The Greeks and Money, created in partnership with Elissavet Aggou Heiraten. This is a web doc, installation, and performance, addressing the current Euro crisis from the perspective of Greek citizens.